Nowadays, exhibitions can be one of the best ways for SMEs to promote their innovative business offerings to acquire/invite/attract new interested international buyers, to meet other players in the industry they operate and to facilitate learning process how companies in similar industry areas are presenting their offerings and promoting their excellence. By seeing all of these in one day a company can get new ideas and enrich its vision how to promote own products to international buyers, what international buyers are actually looking for and how their needs and expectations might differ from national buyers’ one.
Referring to the Centre for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR), it is said that 70 % of the exhibition visitors are planning to buy one or more products, whilst 26 %, actually, sign purchase orders there. Speaking about attendances’ buying decisions, 72% of visitors claim that trade shows influence on their buying decisions. (Leybovich 2012) Moreover, exhibitions and trade shows are considered as meaningful marketing tools which have a direct impact on company’s local and global market competitiveness (Kellezi 2014, p. 467). On the one hand, one could say that tradeshows can easily become an important form of the product and service promotion tool for SMEs striving to get a place in international business, but, on the other hand, these exhibitions and participation into them demand money and resources from SMEs. So, when one does participate into an event like this, multiple aspects of product and service presentation should be considered with time and great efforts to get the corresponding return for invested resources: the way how the event booth is set, how information is layout out, what is stated in marketing materials and so on. In short, when SME targets at internationalization and new foreign markets, it can be advised to maximize the value of the exhibition with further preparation of company’s exhibition performance for internationals visits. Specially, in Finland, where it still seems to be
5 the case, that many companies do most of their promotions with native purchasers in mind, but for an international exhibition “wonderer” those few companies that have maximally considered international visitors, what, in turn, means that their promotion booth will definitely stand up compared to what their competitors offer. As analogye to supply chains, you need to collaborate with all the key players in the supply chain to achieve the best end results (Salmela et al., 2011), in exhibitions, your key player is your potential customer, with whom you need to be able to communicate clearly.
In this sense, this report is based on the practical field research to the Finnish biggest exhibition centre Messukeskus. The FinnBuild exhibition was used as an example to see how the construction industry related companies’ product and service promotion did feel and look like for international visitor, and how one could learn from the companies who promoted themselves in the positive light (from the point of visitor’s view of easiness to go and learn more in the booth). With this experience, this report has a goal to provide the practical guidance for Finnish SMEs with simple explanations how they could easily attract little bit more international visitors’ time and interest into their exhibition stands in trade exhibition events like this and other similar events. In this manner, the most important lesson learnt from the FinnBuild exhibition field study are presented as chapters of this report combining several ideas for SMEs to add them visibility in exhibitions for international visitors.
The ideas gathered in this report come from on the field analysis and interpretation of other exhibition visitors’ actions and reactions near and inside the exhibition booths.
The work presented in this report is done as a part of the project looking for ways to support Finnish SME companies to internationalize and, in this particular context, we looked for events like FinnBuild kept in the Messukeskus exhibition centre on the 11th of October 2018. For reader’s information, Messukeskus is the largest event venue in Finland with the exhibition place of 58.000 m² in 7 exhibition halls attracting each year over one million visitors with 75 trade exhibitions (Messukeskus 2019a) and offering
6 great heart-warming service and versatile facilities for enabling continues business networking (Messukeskus 2016). Messukeskus also welcomes international exhibition participants and visitors providing not only easy access location close to the centre of Helsinki and central Pasila station, but also the English language on-site service and website guidance (Messukeskus 2019b). Additionally, as the Finnish main airport (Helsinki-Vantaa) is just a short local train trip away from Messukeskus, one can easily see why this exhibition centre is probably the best place to attract international visitors.
Looking at the amounts of visitors, Messukeskus alone attracts roughly 1,1 to 1,2 million visitors every year, as the following visualisation on the Figure 1 (based on sources: Messukeskus 2015, Messukeskus 2017, STT Info 2018 and STT Info 2019) shows.
Figure 1. Yearly exhibitions visitors in Messukeskus from 2010 to 2018.
Additionally for a reader, one should note that this report does not concern with any analysis of the pre-marketing planning campaign or follow up exhibition performance
7 results. For the full-blown exhibition coverage, one should also look these essential components of exhibition excellence and trade show marketing related tactics (FORZA 2014, p. 3, p. 10). In this particular report, we discuss real practical pragmatic experiences that were gathered from this particular exhibition, as it is seen by the field researchers. The examples and ideas presented in this report are based on field researchers’ experience on the event and the interpretations of the researchers about the nearby visiting customers’ reactions towards different tactics, which the exhibition participating companies were using in this particular event. Authors were looking the exhibition as visitor experience point of view, but also trying to spot, were the most typical and nowadays a lot discussed digitalization (Kortelainen and Happonen, 2017;
Kortelainen et al. 2019) and personalised & customized product designs (Piili et al., 2013; Widmaier et al., 2013), robotization and automatization related aspects already widely present in this particular buildings related exhibition. Also we were interested, has the 10 years old construction industry related research directions (Porras et al., 2006; Kallonen et al., 2007; Hämäläinen et al., 2008) been nowadays already implemented in practical world applications and if yes, how would these be present in exhibition.
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